It’d be nice to think that the brouhaha over gays, Christianity, and Duck Dynasty could be the moment we hash this all out and get the chips on the table. I tend to doubt it… or at least I doubt that we’ll do it in a way that’s ultimately healthy and good for our shared community.

For that sort of exchange to happen, the debate has to be an honest one. Sure, there’ll be anger and disagreement, heat and name calling, but as I suggested, yesterday, there’s no equality without honesty, even if it’s painful. Also as I suggested, yesterday, the civility that’s being trumpeted is ultimately a way for smooth talkers/writers to silence their opposition.

So, today we get Josh Barro using his Business Insider column to highlight some things Dynasty’s Phil Robertson has said that, Barro insists, show that conservatives are really indefensible bigots for whom sexual prudery is of a kind with racism. (Where black Christians fit into the picture, I’d love for Josh to explain.)

The first statement that puts Robertson beyond the pale, according to Barro, is one concerning the experience of growing up in the pre-Civil-Rights-Era South. Barro presents a pull-quote from Robertson’s interview with GQ in which he says he never saw “with [his] eyes… the mistreatment of any black person.” There’s no context to know what point Robertson was making. Barro insists it must have been an expression of disbelief that blacks were treated badly “in the Jim Crow-era South.” It could just as easily be, however, a statement that there were pockets of communities that could have pointed another way to racial harmony than the damage of (in Robertson’s words) entitlement and welfare.

The second statement is one about the death toll of societies without substantial numbers of Christians, with four examples given, in this order: Nazis, Shintos, Communists, and Islamists. Naturally, Barro highlights the Shintos, because it allows him to further the false narrative about the undercurrent of conservatives’ racism.

But it’s the third statement that is Barro’s clincher. Here it is in full:

Robertson hates gay people. Robertson in 2010: “Women with women, men with men, they committed indecent acts with one another, and they received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil.”

I suspect Barro didn’t take the time to find the video that is the source of that quotation and watch it in context. I’ve cued it up for you, here. There are two important points to illustrate the dishonesty at work behind Barro’s essay, and presumably that of whatever his sources were.

First: Robertson’s words are practically a direct quotation of Romans 1:22-31 (psst, that’s a reference to the Bible). Second: Robertson, like St. Paul, was not talking about homosexuality as the source or unique symbol of all the listed sins. Rather, the wide variety of human sins are presented, by both men, as a consequence of disbelief in God and the worship of false idols. Indeed, Robertson begins this portion of his speech talking about naked PETA protestors telling people not to eat chicken.

It’s difficult to conclude otherwise than that the objective is not just to make people squeamish about defending Phil Robertson, but to make them squeamish about defending Christianity, even if they are believers… at least until the Bible has been thoroughly vetted and edited by folks like Josh Barro and his fellow activists.

That all kind of makes Robertson’s and St. Paul’s point. Without God as the focal point of our understanding of reality and morality, idols fill the gap — whether animals or money or our own lusts. In the service of those idols, the mission then becomes one of tearing down everything that points toward God at the expense of the idols — whether it’s the institution of marriage, the civic order that allows us to define our own government, or the social rules that enable us to be equals.

In a Twitter conversation on this subject, Barro insisted to me: “if you’re saying I’m doing things that are destroying society, you hate me.” Frankly, I’m baffled as to why hatred has to enter into it at all, except inasmuch as raw emotion is all that’s left to explain disagreements when the assumption of a natural order to things is removed.

And so it goes. Within Twitter’s enforced boundaries for pith, I replied that Barro could only be correct if saving society is more important to me than saving him. Obviously, by “him” I mean people who give signs of falling into idolatry, and obviously, the question is one of priorities. What’s more important: the human creation of our civil society or the actual people whose well-being it’s intended to facilitate?

Barro’s reply may give some indication both of his answer and of the relevance of hatred to the discussion: “oh spare me that bulls***.”

There are two visions on the table. In Barro’s increasingly common one, the “society” that Phil Robertson is trying to preserve is one built on worldly privilege, and whatever we might say about the Kingdom of God, we’re really all about keeping other people down out of hatred.  For this vision to apply, minority groups must be reduced to the traits that separate them from the caricature of the “privileged” class and individuals must be defined by skin and the preferences of their affections.  Sexually or economically, the privileged get to do what they want to do, and for that to make them special, others must be put down.

In the one that Robertson actually proclaims, our eyes should be on the Kingdom, and the civic and social institutions that we seek to preserve are of value only to the extent that they allow us, as individuals, to work together and to achieve our own potential, which Christianity proclaims to be nothing short of communion with God.  Individuals are equal in the eyes of God, and should be in ours, but a critical part of equality is a recognition of how each of us, uniquely, is inclined to err.  None of us gets to do everything we want to do; being special is a complementary, not negatory, condition; and we all should be raised up, not condescended to.